What are the demographics of your company’s audience? Do you aim your marketing efforts at a younger crowd, such as Millennials? Or do you focus more on trying to reach Baby Boomers? Maybe you market to a diverse crowd, but segment your marketing materials in order to be sure you’re hitting the right themes with each different group.
Regardless of your audience and the way you market to them, odds are that you have certain ideas about their interests and habits, and that you use these to tailor your marketing specifically to their preferences. And while it is a sound strategy to customize your communications based on consumer personas, there are some prevailing assumptions about each generation that just don’t hold up under closer scrutiny.
One example of such a preconception is which type of smart phone, and which operating system, each generation prefers to use. The general consensus is that younger consumers overwhelmingly choose the more affordable and more “rebellious” Android operating systems, while the older crowd prefers the simplicity and prestige of the iPhone.
However, a recent Forrester report begs to differ. According to their research, Baby Boomers aged 48 to 57 actually own Android phones over iPhones at a higher rate than any other generation—with 47% choosing Android, and only 33% iPhones. At the same time, they found that only slightly more Millennials own Android phones than iPhones.
It seems that conventional wisdom was wrong on this count—and that anyone targeting Baby Boomers exclusively through apps for iPhones, or targeting Millennials primarily through Android apps, is missing out on reaching a significant segment of their market.
With these new-found facts in mind, it just makes sense for businesses to embrace cross-platform app development, as opposed to developing native mobile apps that only function on a certain operating system.
By developing cross-platform mobile apps, enterprises will be able to reach a much larger number of their audience members at once. And cross-platform app development is also a much faster, more affordable, and easier process than developing a separate app for each operating system, making it more cost-effective, and enabling it to provide your business with a more significant ROI.
Cross-platform apps provide many other benefits, as well. Once one has been designed, segments of the code used to create it can then be used in other, future mobile apps your company develops, which cuts down on development time and cost even further. And the fact that cross-platform mobile apps are web-based means that they are instantly and easily able to be integrated into the cloud for hosting services, simple to deploy and install onto a user’s mobile device through a browser, and a snap to update, without having to deal with the hassle of manual downloads.
So in order to realize the highest possible ROI from your mobile app, cross-platform mobile apps are undeniably the best choice. Reach the largest number of customers possible, no matter your enterprise’s audience demographics.
To start your cross-platform development project, reach out to the team at 7T. Our agile open source development platform, STAX, supports both native and cross-platform development. In addition, our developers are experts in creative UI/UX design, mobile security and mobile analytics. We can help your business develop a high-performance app that is secure and user-tested.
Based in Dallas, 7T maintains regional offices located in Chicago and Houston. To discuss your development project, contact 7T today!
